Displaced objects and postmemory in Michel Valensi’s L’empreinte

Abstract

L’empreinte, by Michel Valensi, is a unique novel about the memory of Tunisian Jews exiled in France. Written when the author, himself from a family of exiles who left his hometown at the age of six, was 20 years old, it was originally published by a small Tunis publisher in 1983 but received virtually no attention from critics or the publishing market. Reissued in Paris in 2021, the book attempts, in the author's words, to narrate "what life was made of for the Jews of Tunis". Displaced objects and the author's own post-memory are the raw material for an evocative and nostalgic writing that simultaneously constellates the echoes of a vanished world and acknowledges the inevitable and irreversible nature of its disappearance. Using poorly printed photographs long before an author like W. G. Sebald popularized the use of this narrative device, as well as descriptions of so-called kchouchs—small, useless objects that are signs of interrupted existences—Valensi created an avant-garde novel that occupies a prominent place in Jewish literature of emigration from the Arab world.